10 Important Tricks for Newsletter Design

Newsletters are an important tool for getting in touch with customers, and to really foster engagement with your them via your newsletter, there are certain elements that must be considered carefully, including the design. Below are ten tricks to keep your newsletter design effective.

1. Use a good header

A good header should draw the user in and make them want to read on. It should be bold and say something about the brand while keeping it clean.

2. Go bold with colours

It is a newsletter not a newspaper, so don’t be scared to go bold with colours. Get creative with colours, but remain true to your brand identity.

3. Go bold with images too

A picture really is worth a thousand words, so include a related image in the top half of your newsletter to captivate readers.

4. Remember mobile devices

With every design decision you take, be sure to consider what the newsletter will look like on a mobile device.

5. Use system fonts

If you don’t stick with system fonts like Tahoma and Arial, you’ll be stuck with using images for text.

6. Offer a plain text alternative

With devices like the Apple watch increasingly being used to access email, you need to provide a plain text email alternative.

7. Don’t overdo anything

Don’t overdo any design element, whether it is images or colours. The newsletter is going to appear in a customer’s mail box, not a landing page.

8. Create a style palette

It is important to create a style palette so you can easily achieve a consistent hierarchy to the newsletter. The colours, font sizes, and styles need to be visually arranged in such a way that the reader will be guided through the hierarchy you have created.

9. Ditch busy backgrounds

Use a simple background and do away with background images and busy backgrounds. While some email clients will not render them properly, others like Microsoft Outlook won’t render them at all.

10. Resize all images

You don’t want to go any higher than 72 dpi for your images. Also, you must resize them to fit the email because smaller images will take forever to load. Long download times will annoy users.

On a final note, it is important to test your design on different email clients. Also, before sending each email out, send to yourself first.